Spy camera spots wild gorillas singing to themselves

For the first time ever, footage of what appears to be wild gorillas singing to themselves has been captured on camera and it’s quite the spectacle.

The singing gorillas were captured using a very special type of camera – that being a ‘robotic spy’ designed to look like baby gorilla.

The footage was made available by the PBS nature series “Nature Spy in the wild 2” and documents what life is like living with these elusive animals, through the ‘eyes’ of a robot gorilla. The robotic spy features a wide range of realistic behaviours which enabled it to seamlessly interact with its real life counter parts.

While speaking to LiveScience, Spy In The Wild 2 producer Matt Gordon had this to say about the robot gorilla: “Eye communication is very important amongst gorillas. You’ll see in the footage in the first episode; the gorillas came straight over to our spy gorilla and peered right into its eyes. So we made sure that the gorilla had the most amount of detail put into the face.”

Gordon also explained how exactly they got the silverback gorillas to accept the robotic spy, “We wanted to make sure that we were not being threatening, so we averted the gaze of our spy gorilla. This display of submissiveness convinced the male that the robot wasn’t a threat; he then signaled to the troop that it was safe for them to take a closer look at the “stranger.”

You can see in the video below that as the gorillas begin to munch down on leaves and their stems, they begin to sing to themselves. The alpha male silverback can be heard humming with a deep timbre while others have more high-pitched voices.

In 2016 researchers discovered that gorillas do indeed sing to themselves when eating, however wild gorillas have never been filmed performing the human-like act until now.